Dance, Contemporary dance, Kirstin Innes

Be-Dom

Joyous fun with Portuguese drums

As the huge white screen they’ve been playing behind in silhouette collapses to reveal what appears to be a junkyard full of cavorting, hunky (and fairly well-scrubbed) crusties, the tone is set for an hour of shambolic play. Switching fairly…

Continent

Barton finks too much

There’s something curiously retro about this little piece, from the tight-fitting, slightly shiny suits worn by its performers to the old fashioned world of typewriters and briefcases it conjures up.

Six Short Piano Pieces

Arnold Schoenberg wrote his sparse, tiny Sechs Kleine Klavierstücke (Six Short Piano Pieces) in 1911, at a time of great personal and artistic upheaval. It’s no coincidence that Ian Spink has chosen this particular work for his first choreographic…

Gelabert Azzopardi Companyia de Dansa

Works of total theatre from Cesc Gelabert

Catalan choreographer, Cesc Gelabert is back at the Edinburgh International Festival after a five-year absence. He’s been missed, and the two new works he delivers in this double-bill show exactly why. These are works of total theatre, where music…

Spectrum

Late-night telly turns hip hop fantasia

The old BBC 2 test card – yes, that one, with the little girl and the clown – is a bit of a strange premise to build a whole hip hop show around, but London’s Avant Garde Dance has managed to make it work. One dancer plays the girl, the others just…

Four Quarters

Contemporary dance in shooter form

Tired after days of mediocre Fringe shows? Proceed directly to Zoo and ingest these four sharp little shots of contemporary dance performance. The magnetic Isobel Cohen, who curated the show and appears in three of the works, starts things off by…

Elvis Still My Heart

No, Elvis has definitely left the building

Louise Barrett is a fantastically talented physical performer. You can’t take your eyes off her. In spindly ‘spinster’ Agnes, subliminating repressed sexuality into an obsession with the King, his eroticised pelvic flicks translated into nervous…

The Chair

Family, death and narrative dance

Over the past couple of years, Zoo Venue has got increasingly good at giving opportunities not only to the most interesting international dance companies, but exciting younger companies from the UK. In that slot this year is C-12 Dance Company…

Holdin' Fast

The mathematics of sexuality

As we file into the UK debut by the Czech Republic’s only professional contemporary dance company, we’re confronted by the body of a young man, draped over a blackboard covered in mathematical equations. Upstage, under a half-raised curtain, running…

The Judgment of Paris

Can Can, corsets and high camp

With sculpted, Harlow-platinum wigs, gorgeously gilded corsetry and tongues in cheeks firmly set to ‘high camp’, this riotous piece of dance theatre by Company XIV merges Baroque dance forms, Can Can and contemporary ballet to music by Offenbach and…

Damned Beautiful

Dorian Gray does discordancy

One of many pieces pivoting on The Picture of Dorian Gray at this year’s Fringe, this duet pares down the complexities of Wilde’s novel to focus on the obsessive sexual relationship between Basil Hallward and his beautiful boy. There is some beautiful…

Nederlands Dans Theater 1

CONTEMPORARY DANCE Edinburgh Festival Theatre, Fri 11 & Sat 12 Apr Although Nederlands Dans Theater’s ever-excellent youth company paid us a visit in May 2007, it’s been almost two years since principal company NDT1’s memorable, award-winning…

Ballerina Who Loves a B-Boy

Although it’s been crammed into a hotel function room better suited to the cringey frugging of a wedding disco, this gleeful little production is the most assured and exuberant of the cluster of Korean breakdance shows infesting the Fringe this…

Desert Island Dances

This year, a proportion of the Fringe dance programme seems to be backing away from huge, political themes, focusing instead on small, personal moments of introversion. Desert Island Dances by Wendy Houston, whose Haunted, Daunted and Flaunted triptych…

Leitmotif

Andrew Dawson is excitedly telling us about a company who film train journeys; no commentary, just a camera stuck to the front of the engine. He plays us the video – Bognor Regis to Victoria – and hops excitedly into the frame to point out the corner he…

Maximum Crew

Korean breakdance has evolved away from the po-faced machismo that can pervade Western scenes, so while the dancers may still occasionally come across as cocky show-offs, they’re not afraid of self-parody or knowing camp. Over there the b-boy crews…